Molly McMahon Professor Deborah Schaller ENGL 370-001 7 May 2013 Mirandas Narrative The children absorbed in schoolyard

games of playing pretend will grow into adults who still imagine their lives according to the rhythm of a plot. Am I ambitious? Looking for love? Eager to discover my true self? All of these desires come with readymade plot lines that can be snipped and shaped to fit [ones] needs (Felski). Miranda, the lost daughter in the crime novel Last Seen Leaving, by Kelly Braffet, is no exception to this rule. Sitting on the beach, she is taken back to her childhood, and reminisces about how when she was a little girl this kind of weathermade her think of movies where something fantastic happens to somebody hopeless, just as she feels, perhaps, alone on the beach. She believes, and always has believed, in the power of stories and thus directs her life accordingly. Though her life narrative is continually changed by outside forces, as is the nature of the world, she chooses a new story when her current one falls short of her expectations or desires. She embodies the new feminist movement of creating a new narrative that empowers females as the plots driving force, rather than as a passive participant in a male plotline. Though we typically associate authors of books with things like narrative and plot, Felski makes the point that plots are ubiquitous not just in literature but [also] in life. That is, narrative goes beyond the pages of a published work. Humans are a

McMahon 2 naturally inquisitive animal; our unique consciousness that separates us from other animals is on the continual search for answers to the question why? In order to make sense of the random happenings of our individual realities (which are truly, statistically, random happenings of the universe) we create a story line, a larger pattern, in which we are the main character (Felski). We garner a sense of security by finding answers, such as in the case of Anne, the mother of the missing Miranda. Rather than her husbands death being a random event, she continually attempts to find meaning in the chaos by digging for answers to the question of why he died. She acts in the same way to make sense of and solve the mystery of her daughters disappearance, turning herself into the detective character of her own life narrative in which the end of the story, Rescue Mission results in finding Miranda (Braffet). Miranda, however, is very purposeful in the composing of her lifes plotline, and it is Miranda who encounters the feminist issue with traditional myth and archetype because of her strong authorial character type. Miranda is a woman of the 21st century, and the old rules of female characters no longer apply. What Felski lays out in her plot chapter of Literature After Feminism that is most relevant to Mirandas particular case is the struggle for women in participating in their narrative as a force of power rather than as an object or background character. Traditional stories, dating back to the first written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, place male figures in the active protagonist role, as the doers and makers of the world around them. Males are typically displayed as the heroes, just as George places himself in that role as the rescuer of Miranda, though she does not relish the idea of being rescued. His

McMahon 3 duty as a man, traditionally, is to sweep the damsel in distress from her peril and take her to his castle, or in Georges case, Florida. To go along with George, or to allow herself to be walked home by her boyfriend, or to rely on her partner for financial support is to accept that women do not drive the narrative. They are without psychological depth or plausible motivation, existing only in relation to the hero, as a dangerous threat or enticing reward" (Felski). Miranda is not wrong for being drawn to Georges male-dominated plotline, just as she is drawn to her protective boyfriend Tom, or her supporter, Rainier. Many traditional plots, after all, appeal to women as well to men, and Miranda readily admits to herself that she is drawn to inhabiting the role of the protected, that she likes the niceness of having a someone, the security (Felski, Braffet). At the same time that she acknowledges that a part of her likes playing into that traditional female role, Miranda also feels irked, or as she calls it, itchy, to complacently place herself there. From this itch stems her desire to change her story to one where she can play the heroine, and her method of doing so is to abandon her current story and to start over new. Methodically abandoning and restarting her various narratives when they no longer serve her allows Miranda to come into a greater sense of self-knowledge through what Jean-Paul Sartre calls his progressive-regressive method. This method is one that allows for significant personal growth, after all the individual came to be who she is as an accumulation of past events and choices among possibilities, and she will continue along the trajectory of self-creation through the repeated creation of new narratives. The progressive-regressive method is an analytical process for moving

McMahon 4 forward and backward through a personal narrative to chart significant events that recur in a persons life in different forms over time (Bloom). And this method meshes neatly what Felski insists should come naturally to Miranda: " [a] women's relationship to plot is surely a matter of creation rather than destruction, of innovation rather then irony. Mirandas narratives that she repeatedly, though with variation, composes are those where she shares her life with a man until she determines that there is an imbalance of power leaning towards the male-centered traditional plot. Early in the Last Seen, an interaction between Miranda and her boyfriend reveals how she feels about playing the part of the damsel: I heard he killed pretty girls who hang out on the beach by themselves. He put his are around her and pulled her close. Maybe I should leave you here. Then when he comes for you, I can rescue you. His breath on her face was hot. She pulled back. My fucking hero, she said. And so it is when Miranda feels that she is no longer the authorial force of her life narrative that she abandons and begins over new. This is seen towards the end of the novel, when she abandons Rainiers vanbecause she has become completely dependent on him to survive, relying on him for income and shelterand takes advantage of the escape offered by George. When she realizes that this new plotline features George as the driving force and hero, she takes the wheelliterallyto bring the storyline to a screeching halt. Alternatively, Miranda may take the help offered by the mysteriously shady character of George, who potentially is the aforementioned serial killer, so that she can rescue herself, rather than allow her boyfriend to do so. In each

McMahon 5 narrative, either way, Miranda can be seen repeatedly abandoning and taking up new plotlines that she feels suits her empowered inclination. Miranda is, at the end of the day, a character that represents the young women of the21st century. Generations of women before her have fought long and hard to break the rigid molds of traditional mythical narrative, and Miranda takes of the brush of feminism given to her by her predecessors and, with it, experiments on the blank canvas of her life. Each repetition is a trial, and Miranda feels comfortable enough with crumpling up her paintings are starting over fresha rare quality in anyonein order to achieve the masterpiece she has envisioned. Braffet has created a character that failure is not really failure; it is merely a learning experience that changes her into a slightly new person. Miranda is an ideal role model for the girls of this century. She lets us know that, over all, what is important is that you take control of your narrative, because you are the character that must live within it.